Category: Business Process Management

2019 Law Department Operations Survey

Posted on September 30, 2019 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

20 Minutes of Your Time Can Impact the Entire Legal Operations Profession

What do the next 10 years hold for legal ops? According to the Blickstein Group, it’s likely to be more change at an even faster pace in law departments, in law firms and industrywide. More and more general counsel agree on the need for LDO professionals and the skills they embody. They are also actively pushing their lawyers to conduct business with the level of “operational awareness” required to succeed in today’s legal market. What is a quick way to make an impact toward improving the LDO profession as a whole? Take a survey!

Onit is excited to be a sponsor of the Blickstein Group Law Department Operations Survey and we invite you to take the survey, which is the only way to receive the full results with unique and valuable insight into law department management trends.

Blickstein Group’s Law Department Operations Survey is the longest running research specifically covering legal operations. It is designed solely for the professionals who manage complex legal department operations for their companies. Onit has been a part of it for years and are thrilled to do so again.

The survey will take you only 20-25 minutes to fill out. There is no cost, but only survey participants receive a copy of the valuable proprietary results – including 300 data points you can use to benchmark and better understand trends in legal operations!  You can access previous years’ survey reports, with a summary analysis of results, here.

All responses will be kept strictly confidential, and data will only be used in aggregate form.

Please complete the survey by October 4.

Onit Launches Contract Lifecycle Management Software

Posted on September 26, 2019 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

Contract management has always been a siloed entity from the rest of the company that is normally handled by the legal department or dedicated contract managers with legal knowledge. But for those who aren’t familiar, what is contract management? In simplest terms, contract management is the process of managing contract creation, deliverables, deadlines, terms, conditions, and execution, while ensuring all parties involved comply with the signed agreement until the contract lifecycle ends. Many companies still use manual processes to manage their contracts but this can become a very labor-intensive and time-consuming operation that ultimately ends with an overflowing file cabinet that is eventually lost or forgotten. When contracts aren’t managed or analyzed properly, companies can unknowingly become non-compliant or miss substantial profits.

Therefore, by driving technology and automation to manage the contract management lifecycle, companies can dramatically increase efficiency by reducing contract processing times, mitigate risk by tracking all contract agreements and improve overall customer and vendor satisfaction in the process. Onit observed that most customers experienced this pain when it came to the management of their contracts and decided to take action.

Today, Onit launched its new contract lifecycle management (CLM) software which empowers legal and business teams with end-to-end automation of their entire contract management process. Onit CLM is a cloud-based contract repository with automated functionality that supports all phases of the contract lifecycle from capture and creation, through negotiations and approvals, to execution and post-execution management.

onitfinaostage.wpenginepowered.com Contract Lifecycle Management Dashboard

With Onit CLM, companies can automatically generate well-formed custom contracts and include/exclude clauses based on a robust rules engine and contract metadata. It also empowers users with Microsoft Word integration, allowing them to create, review, approve, and execute on contracts straight from their preferred word processing tool while maintaining a secure link to Onit CLM. Seamless eSignature integration with DocuSign and Adobe Sign is another out of the box feature that comes with Onit CLM, to ensure convenient and rapid execution.

Onit developed CLM to allow companies to not only dispose of their outdated manual processes or legacy systems but to combine the management of contracts throughout the enterprise into a single cloud-based platform. Deployed in the world’s most advanced cloud platform, Amazon AWS, companies are able to achieve maximum performance, reliability, and scalability. With this cloud-based approach, Onit CLM is accessible on all major web browsers and mobile devices allowing end-users to access their business-critical contract information anytime, anywhere.

In conclusion, technology is paving the way for organizations to maximize control, speed, and provide greater insight throughout the entire contract lifecycle. Effective contract management can maximize reward, minimize risk and ultimately create powerful business relationships and pave the road to greater profitability over the long term.

Click here to read the entire press release or listen to a podcast from Onit’s CLM product manager Victor Cizinauskas.

Listen to Onit’s Podcast About Our New Contract Lifecycle Management Solution

Posted on September 25, 2019 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

We’re thrilled to announce our latest podcast! In this episode, Onit’s Senior Product Manager for Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM), Victor Cizinauskas offers some interesting insight into Onit CLM.

Vic begins by covering a bit of background behind the development of Onit CLM, the next evolution of Onit’s current contracts offering. He goes on to share some of the business benefits of this contract management tool, such as streamlining and automating manual processes. Manual, disconnected contract processes still plague many organizations of all sizes, and Onit CLM makes these processes much less error prone. This significantly mitigates risk in the contract process. For example, sales wants the contract done quickly, while legal wants to take time to review and make sure everything is absolutely correct. Onit CLM goes a long way in balancing these two seemingly opposing forces, driving faster revenue and managing risk appropriately.

Vic then explains how Onit CLM is unique. It is built on Onit’s proprietary software platform which allows Onit CLM to integrate seamlessly with our other products – legal holds and enterprise legal management for example. Onit CLM is also integrated with MS Word, much to the delight of lawyers and legal operations professionals worldwide.

In closing, Vic tells us why implementing contract lifecycle management technology should be a top priority for any organization. “To save time and money,” he simply explains. It’s hard to think of better reasons than those.

Listen to the podcast.


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Driving Disruption in the Legal Department Part III: What’s Ahead for Legal Operations

Posted on September 11, 2019 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Enterprise Legal Management

In part II of this blog series we discussed the joining of forces of legal operations and technology. Technology has been a key player in the unprecedented growth of legal operations in recent years, and this relationship will continue growing even faster. Now it’s time to reveal what some experts have to say about the future of legal ops.

To set the stage for what the future holds, it’s best to see the current lay of the land in legal operations. There have been some major disruptions in the legal sector in the past decade, one of which is advancements in technology. Some external and internal drivers of change have been the rising cost of legal services, the strategy of doing more with less, globalization, mergers and acquisitions, and advancements in cutting-edge technologies1.

Onit’s CEO Eric M. Elfman and Nathan Wenzel, General Manager and Co-founder of SimpleLegal have each spent almost three decades in disciplines that are now known as legal operations. Based on their experiences, these thought leaders foresee continued growth in legal ops, with legal operations professionals moving well past matter management, spend management, and the selection of counsel and evolving into more strategic roles. Here are their seven predictions for the future of legal operations:

  1. Legal operations professionals will continue to take on administrative burdens – in far more areas than spend management – in order to let lawyers be lawyers.
  2. Law departments will work to untangle overcomplexity in their enterprise legal management systems and return to basics that allow work to be done more efficiently and effectively.
  3. The use of collaboration and workflow tools will continue to grow as the legal function becomes more global and complex.
  4. More will be expected of technology vendors, and law departments will less frequently integrate a variety of tools and instead build platforms that handle multiple functions seamlessly.
  5. Legal ops professionals will engage more closely and directly with their companies’ businesses units, with a heightened focus on turn time and customer satisfaction.
  6. Law departments will build expertise to match the pricing experts that have become commonplace in law firms. Firms currently have the advantage in negotiations and AFAs because they understand the data better; legal ops will look to even the playing field.
  7. Legal operations professionals – and in-house counsel – must get better at data and analytics in order to make better decisions to behave more like business units while also better serving their clients.

Advancements in technology, process-driven service delivery and evolving and segmented roles in operations will be spearheading the future of legal operations for many years to come. The most proactive legal departments have already recognized this and are taking control of their future by taking action now.

Click here to read the white paper, Driving Disruption in the Law Department.

1 The legal department of the future: How disruptive trends are creating a new business model for in-house counsel. Deloitte, 2018.

Driving Disruption in the Legal Department Part I: The Rapid Evolution of Legal Operations

Posted on August 27, 2019 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Enterprise Legal Management

The pressure to run the legal department like a business has been gaining traction for several years. Driving efficiencies and containing costs are two key reasons that legal operations is important and is growing so quickly. In addition, law departments were forced to adopt a more operationally focused mindset as a result of the Great Recession. The 2008 downturn was so severe, and efficiency and cost-cutting were considered so critical to the survival of the business at large, that the balloon popped. And since it has, C-suites have increasingly been making their law departments behave more like their other business units. This ultimately led to the rise of a profession dedicated to bringing business discipline to the law department: legal operations.

Legal operations professionals handle the management of vendors, systems, strategic planning, technology, knowledge, financial issues and the myriad other tasks that can overwhelm the legal department. Legal operations is all about optimizing the legal department’s ability to help grow the company, and is a multi-disciplinary function that optimizes legal services delivery to a business or government entity by focusing on twelve core competencies. The competencies, developed by the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), are divided among three levels: foundational, advanced and mature. Almost every legal department function is covered, including vendor management, technology and process support, service delivery and litigation support.

Legal operations professionals are now managing outside vendors, implementing technology, overall legal spend and many other aspects of the legal department. And it’s not only happening in the Fortune 500 companies (as it was a few years ago); smaller companies are getting aboard as well. We believe that legal operations will be responsible for some of the biggest changes in the legal ecosystem in years to come.

Click here to download the full white paper, “Driving Disruption in the Law Department”

The Lean, Mean Legal Department Part II: Technology to the Rescue

Posted on August 13, 2019 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Enterprise Legal Management

Cost control and cost management have, and continue to be, among the biggest challenges of legal departments around the globe. How have legal departments been handling this? By increasing the workload of existing resources, bringing on more in-house lawyers, and implementing more technology. Increasing the workload? Something employees definitely don’t want to hear. Hiring more in-house lawyers? That’s not really making things “leaner,” is it? That leaves us with technology. Let’s investigate this option a little more by first referring to HBR Consulting’s 2018 Law Department Survey:

“Law departments also continue in their efforts to streamline operations, not only to control costs but also continue to increase efficiency. Legal technology continues to be a focus of many departments and plan implementation of next generation technologies to increase productivity. Law departments continue to be interested in data-related technologies, with 28 percent indicating they plan to implement artificial intelligence technology in the next one to two years, and 26 percent planning to implement legal spend analytics. These were topped, however, by contract management solutions, which 29 percent plan to implement in the next one to two years. These new legal technologies help automate manual workflows and create visibility into workload and spending, allowing organizations to improve operating efficiency and facilitate decision making.”

E-billing, matter management, legal holds and contract management top the list of most implemented legal technology, but there are many others. Interestingly, the top two areas where customers are moving out of their existing deficient systems are e-billing and matter management. This points to an even greater demand for those cutting-edge companies who provide the crème de la crème of legal technology solutions.

Why has it taken so long for some legal departments to see the light and get on board with technology? Understandably, a lean budget is often cited as one of the major reasons for not implementing legal technology. Resistance to change is another common reason. But one of the other major reasons is a reluctance to integrate new technology with existing systems. Here’s a little secret: resistance to change is really the only thing that should be holding up progress – the other issues of budget and integration have changed considerably in favor of organizations seeking new technology. There are technology solutions out there for practically every budget, and integrations are much more seamless than in the past. Gaining the support of leadership is a big step toward solving the resistance to change. Stop dreading the phrase, “do more with less.” Instead, we challenge you to thrive on it and explore the technology solutions out there that will truly help you do more with less.

Read our white paper, “Doing More with Less: How Technology is Optimizing Legal.”

Listen to Onit’s New Podcast About the HBR Law Department Survey

Posted on August 8, 2019 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events

We’re excited to announce our latest podcast! This episode is even more special since our guest speaker is with HBR Consulting, one of Onit’s key alliance partners. Together with HBR, we’ve worked on 15 projects throughout our years together. This newest podcast features Lauren Chung, practice group leader with HBR’s Strategy and Operations Group.

Lauren begins by telling us a bit about the HBR Law Department Survey, the leading source of benchmarking data for U.S. and global law departments. The survey provides key metrics concerning legal spending, law department staffing, industry trends, diversity, and customized results. The comprehensive nature of the survey is what makes it unique. The survey is crucial in providing participants a detailed look at how they compare with their law department peers. In this way, departments can see areas in which they are strong or lacking. The survey is also a key performance management indicator to justify hiring, spend, and how effectively the department is managing resources. In fact, the survey has proven itself to be an effective tool in driving law departments’ performance management programs.

Lauren closes by explaining how to participate in the survey. The deadline for this year’s survey is mid-August, and those interested in participating may write to [email protected]. Survey results will be published sometimes this fall.  The upcoming 2019 survey will reveal somewhat of a hidden surprise for participants – results will be displayed in a dynamic recorded format.

Listen to this podcast.

The Lean, Mean Legal Department Part I: Setting the Stage with CLOC

Posted on July 31, 2019 by - Business Process Management, Contract Lifecycle Management, Enterprise Legal Management

“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”
– Bill Gates

When I was serving in the Marine Corps, we were obsessed with becoming the quintessential lean, mean, fighting machine. It wasn’t the lifestyle for everyone, but it was our passion and we took it very seriously. But think about it: can’t lean, mean, fighting machine be applied to the corporate world? In fact, it’s not a stretch by any means. The Art of War has been required reading for top executives for decades. And everyone is striving to be fitter these days, and leaner. The ‘mean’ and ‘fighting’ part? Our definition here is to aggressively pursue a strategy of driving efficiencies and optimizing the legal department’s ability to grow the company.

The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) was created to help legal operations professionals and other core corporate legal industry players optimize the legal service delivery models needed to support the needs of legal departments of all sizes. CLOC’s 12 core competencies represent areas of focus that every legal operations department must manage to have a disciplined, efficient, and effective legal operations function. These competencies serve as a benchmark to compare a legal operations department’s growth to others in the industry and break down legal operations departments into foundational, advanced and mature in order to improve and grow systemically.

One of the 12 competencies is Technology and Process Support. This is defined as:

“Create a long-term legal operations technology roadmap including tools such as e-billing/matter management, contract management, content management, IP management, business process management, e-signature, board management, compliance management, legal hold, subsidiary management, etc.”

CLOC’s other 11 competencies are equally important to legal operations, but we will be focusing on Technology and Process Support, and how it plays into becoming a lean, mean legal department. This blog series will focus on strategies to achieve these seemingly elusive, but not out-of-reach, objectives.

Read our white paper, Doing More with Less: How Technology is Optimizing Legal Operations.

Connections are Crucial for Enterprise Software Solutions

Posted on July 19, 2019 by - Business Process Management

“Eventually everything connects – people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se.”
– Charles Eames

Life used to be lot easier, right? Well, that depends on who you ask. One thing is for sure – computers were a lot simpler. Databases and other application software usually served their purpose and we would just switch from one application to another when we needed to. But in most cases these programs were virtually separate and were not able to exchange data. We’ve all heard of ‘working in a silos.’ Well, those applications were basically information silos. Connections between programs, if any, were simple point-to-point and set up on an as-needed basis. After a while, this collection of connections would become very difficult to maintain and not very efficient. Essentially, what was missing was unrestricted and seamless sharing of data and business processes among all the application or data sources in the enterprise.

Nowadays, complex systems and programs need to interact with each other even more than in the past. Ideally, we want to connect applications in order to simplify business processes and avoid having to make extensive changes to existing applications. Processing data, requests, confirmations, and messages are just some of the interactions that are happening every second of the day, and it just makes sense to have applications that can share large amounts of data for processing or organization.

Let’s say a company has implemented a new legal technology solution for legal service requests, legal holds, contract management or a complex enterprise legal management system. In addition to their new technology, the company will continue using their existing applications such as AdobeSign, DocuSign, Microsoft Active Directory, ILM, iManage, Salesforce, PeopleSoft, One IBM or a myriad of other applications. All of these can be integrated with their newest technology solution but it needs to be done the right way.

As you’re shopping around for new process automation technology, you may hear fancy terms describing various integration methods. Flat-file integration allows data to be passed between different systems without necessarily connecting directly to them. API integration uses a protocol such as REST or SOAP and is the more modern method of integrating, but not always the best solution. For example, not all applications have available APIs for integration. Native actions are built by the technology provider are another method used. Every customer has a unique integration situation, so it’s extremely important to get it right the first time.

One thing many people overlook when looking for new process automation technology, is the importance of looking at the provider’s ability to use the best integration method for your particular situation. Partnering with a provider who is proficient with more than one integration method is also a big advantage. It’s all too easy to get caught up in all the great features of the new product and what it will do for your company. Just remember to look at how the provider will integrate it. You can implement the best technology available, but without proper and solid integration you won’t be getting the best out of it.

Onit Acquires SimpleLegal to Modernize Global Legal Operations

Posted on May 13, 2019 by - Business Process Management, Company News and Events, Enterprise Legal Management

Onit is excited to formally announce the acquisition of SimpleLegal, a leading US-based provider of spend, matter and vendor management software. This combination of Onit and SimpleLegal follows a formative investment in Onit by K1 Investment Management (K1) earlier this year.

This combination of Onit and SimpleLegal will represent the most comprehensive and modern global SaaS solution for the legal operations professional in in the market today and bring together the strengths and market positions of each company, ensuring legal operations professionals have an expansive product offering to run their legal department and business. Together, both companies will continue to deliver innovative software that drives best practices and offer deep domain expertise to serve both small organizations and large and complex enterprises, regardless of department size or geography. The combined company will continue to support each respective solution.

Onit, in combination with SimpleLegal, intends to create a comprehensive one-stop shop addressing most needs of a legal operations team. Each company will continue to operate independently with continuing roadmaps and investment. All support and services will continue as before, and all management teams will remain intact.

Founded in 2013, SimpleLegal is widely recognized as a ‘game changer’ in its own right in the legal technology market. With a “simple” solution delivering fast time-to-value, customers have an easily accessed legal technology on-ramp. In the last five years, SimpleLegal has processed more than $1.8B annually and managed nearly 500,000 matters globally all the while supporting 170+ currencies.

Click here to read the entire press release and listen to podcasts from Onit’s CEO Eric Elfman and SimpleLegal’s CEO Nathan Wenzel.